The Spark is Enter Shikari’s most eclectic and accomplished album to date.

So many records as reflective and evocative as Egypt Station prove to be career codas. Despite occasional misfires this one proves that, at 76, McCartney, socially and sonically, still has plenty to say.

The only new aspect of this follow-up to 2011’s On a Mission is her transatlantic phrasing; otherwise, it’s pretty much the same old thing, with pulsing dubstep synths relentlessly driving things to the lowest common denominator.

The distinctive, sparse trio settings afford a surprising diversity of emotive intimacy.

For the most part, LaMontagne isn’t reinventing the wheel on his seventh album, but he once again proves his music is as reliably good as ever.

Tracks like “No Limit” and “Need U”, with their miasmic, swirling synths and pulsing vibrato effects, epitomise modern boudoir-soul, as Usher slips effortlessly between warm caresses and pleading falsetto.

The 16th GBV album is business as usual: plangent garage rock.

While his obsession is sincere, the oppressive weight of the arrangements, freighted with heavy rock guitars and declamatory drums, occasionally fattened by dramatic strings, makes them hard to engage with on a personal level.

It's far from a perfect album--there's a ponderous solemnity to "Ages", and Pulido so far lacks Smith's compelling, visionary focus--but Antiphon extends the band's engaging, mysterious charm.

Though not wholly succeeding, he offers music as a sanctuary, and world of its own.

With Different Days, though, they seem to have settled into a sort of not-quite-mainstream indie-rock tinted with neo-psychedelic touches.

The quiet piano pieces of Eirenic Life are intriguingly low-key.

The simpler arrangements allow more room for Rhys's sleek harmonies to drive his whimsical wordplay: accordingly, the album has the lush, beguiling charm of a sun-kissed soft-rock album by The Beach Boys or The Young Rascals.

Merritt's main problem may be that his baritone croon makes him sound cynical even when he's baring his heart, an impression only partly undercut by his occasional ukulele strum.

It’s a weird one, mysterious and mildly menacing, but eerily engaging nonetheless.

Hip young American male/female duo Cults look to classic 1960s pop history for the 11 bite-sized pop nuggets of this impressive debut.

It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.

A shameless but cathartic hit of nostalgia.

In large part a break-up album, Rare Birds finds Wilson picking through the romantic embers and taking tentative steps forward, over arrangements reflecting both his recent position in Roger Waters’s touring band and his need for healing.

This third album is a delight, riddled with hooks and energy that hark all the way back to the early 70s heyday of Big Star and The Raspberries.

As a songwriter, Steve Earle is blessed with two apparently contradictory gifts: the ability to animate fictional lives, and a streak of cussed, lefty sincerity that gives bite to his truth-telling.

The results here are surprisingly congenial, their sparkle only slightly subdued by the breathy reverb that swathes everything in a sonic dust entirely appropriate to the 1970s source.

It's dizzying psychedelic country in finest Meat Puppets tradition, full of slightly off-centre harmonies in Grateful Dead manner, and plenty of Kirkwood's swirling, trippy guitar.

Minor Alps is a collaboration between American indie stalwarts Matthew Caws (of Nada Surf) and Juliana Hatfield, an alliance so congruent that Get There is surely the best work of their careers.

After the refreshing change furnished by 2014’s The London Sessions, things are pretty much back to normal for Mary J Blige on Strength Of A Woman, which finds the Queen Of R&B Reproach once again embattled by amorous treachery.

It’s BUSY. The trick – as with a Pollock – is to stand back, soften the joints and enjoy the energy. That energy is delightfully consistent.

It’s all a bit depressing, and not helped by the plodding music, which sags back into plonking piano quadruplets and dissatisfying, baggy sax, leavened by the occasional squall of guitar.

The songs themselves are low-key and unexceptional.